We're all born carrying a unique bag of shit.

Recent realizations have expanded my sense of compassion for myself, my partner, family, friends, all of you, and really the rest of those normies..

It may seem like others’ have it so much better than us because of XYZ but hidden underneath this sort of false, cherry-picked, projection is the fact that we’re all born with our own unique bag of shit.

Maybe your bag of shit is obvious like a physical deformity, a horrible family member, or something more elusive like an inability to focus. Maybe it's all of the above in some sort of diabolical diarrhea shit stew.

It may not be time for us to understand or even see which lovely sack we attained at birth or along the way, but we often do witness our efforts to cope with it, watch it bury our potential dreams, or become something we're determined to overcome.

I’m here to speak to that coping and overcoming today. I’ve been fortunate enough to be dumb enough to start a company… in apparel at that… which has forced near-immediate repercussions for my actions. This could be from you all shining light on some unethical little behavior I thought I could sneak by or just the results of poor planning/hiring/decisions/time management/otherwise. Every day our revenue is a scoreboard.

Hell, just yesterday I broke down from recent manufacturing issues and broke our review removal policy... and I was called on it less than 24 hours later.

What I’m saying is I’m not perfect and it's reasonable to assume no one else is either.

This does not dismiss repercussions; those are actually very useful feedback loops if we want to identify our shitty issues and crappily improve over time. Ideally, we are exposed to these sort of feedback loops earlier in life than when our reputation, relations and careers are on the line.

There are two other reasonable assumptions we can make:

We're all born with a unique bag of shit (varying in type, weight, onset time)

Persevering in the face of said shit is noble

Acknowledging our deficiencies, and recognizing others, is a very human thing to do. There's a lot of science on why most of our problems are genetic in nature, too. Responding to these mountains of crap we share with compassion is irregular and worthwhile. It is the key to developing a positive-growth mindset and treating the humbling lessons we're bound to meet with grace.

My final take is this: Life is a dream-like journey and it's meant to be a difficult.

We're born to face challenges. If it were a video game, who do you respect more? That noob still choosing easy mode or that badass who mastered DDR on hardcore and lost a bunch of weight? If we can be kind to ourselves, take things one-step at a time, and realize we can overcome if we incrementally choose to be real and persevere, that - folks - is how legends are born.